Title(s):
- Chronicle of Arbela
Period covered:
Early 2nd c.-ca. 550
Language:
Syriac
State of Preservation:
Partial
Genre:
- Ecclesiastical history
- Biography (collective)
Remarks:
The Chronicle of Arbela narrates the history of the bishops of that town. The only surviving manuscript was sold by the editor of the Chronicle, Alphonse Mingana, to the National Library of Berlin. Mingana (1908: x-xi) saysthat he found the manuscript in the village of Ekrur, in Kurdistan. A paleographical analysis of the codex suggests that it is a modern copy. The text Mingana published in 1908 presents conspicuous variations in comparison with the text of the manuscript, among which a whole additional page totally absent in the codex (see Assfalg 1966: 27-29). Mingana must therefore have had at his disposal another, more ancient, manuscript, that he never mentions and that is now lost. Based on a bottom note to be found on f. 27v, he ascribed the chronicle to Meshiha-Zekha, East-Syrian author mentioned in Abdisho bar Brika's catalogue, but it has been proven that the note was added by a local scribe on Mingana’s own request (Jullien - Jullien 2001: 46; Vosté 1947: 517). These and other suspicious features brought Fiey (1967) to deny the authenticity of the whole text, saying that it is a forgery produced by Mingana himself. Fiey's case has been considerably weakened by Brock (1967) and his extreme position has not been followed by scholars. The authorship and the period of composition of the text, though, are still open questions, and doubts have been cast over its historical reliability (Brock 1992: 23-26; Jullien - Jullien 2001).
Users:
Sources: